Jon Stewart calls Maga backlash to Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl show ‘actually pathetic’
Late-night hosts addressed the performative Maga outrage over Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl half-time show,Jon Stewart returned to his Monday night Daily Show post fired up about the Super Bowl, and particularly the outrage from conservative pundits such as Megyn Kelly and Benny Johnson over Bad Bunny’s half-time show, which he performed, as usual entirely in Spanish,Stewart played numerous clips of Fox News hosts et al complaining that they couldn’t understand the Spanish, then cut to a clip of Turning Point USA “All-American Halftime Show” headliner, Kid Rock, singing his hit Bawitdaba, with its gibberish chorus,The host then tore into the rightwing talking point that Bad Bunny’s half-time show, whose overarching theme was pan-American unity, was not “unifying” because it was in Spanish,“Why the fuck is it the Super Bowl Halftime entertainer’s job to unify the country? Is that their job?” he fumed.
“Isn’t there another person whose job description is much more along those lines?”He cut to Donald Trump’s attempts to “unify” the country this weekend by posting a racist video depicting the Obama family as apes, then refusing to back down, apologize or even acknowledge the offensiveness of the post.“Another unifying tip might be to tell your guy to stop tweeting out racist slop during Black History Month,” Stewart joked.Then there was the rightwing meltdown over the Olympian freestyle skier Hunter Hess, who said that representing the US brought up “mixed emotions” because “there’s obviously a lot going on that I’m not the biggest fan of and I think a lot of people aren’t”.Trump called Hess “a real loser”, among other things.It all led Stewart to ask: “When did the right become such fucking pussies?”“Remember 2017?” he continued.
“Remember what you hated about liberals? Perpetually offended, safe spaces, censoring free speech, culture of victimhood.Remind you of anyone? ‘Oh, I can’t go 15 minutes without listening to country music.I need a separate show.’ ‘Oh, that skier triggered me.I can’t sleep.
’ Not the best imitation, but you know what I’m going for.“This whole culture war this weekend has really demonstrated one thing: it’s that for all of Maga’s triumphalism, it’s not a movement that seems confident in its position,” he added.“These people who control every branch of government are so triggered by someone singing in Spanish for 20 minutes, they need to create their own safe space alternative half-time show, where Trad Bunny over here is singing songs about how he can’t even enjoy sitting in a truck and drinking beer because he knows that somewhere out there, there’s a trans person.“It’s actually fucking pathetic,” he concluded.“The gap between the power you all wield and the victimhood you all claim is the real offense.
If you didn’t actually have the power to do so much damage in our country, I think we’d all dismiss it as a weak and pathetic pity party.”And in Los Angeles, Jimmy Kimmel also mocked Trump’s claim that he was offended by the Bad Bunny half-time show, which Kimmel called “a tribute to the Spanish-speaking world and to culture”.“This is a man who paid off a porn star who spanked him with his own face on a magazine,” said Kimmel.“And he’s offended by the half-time show.“It really is amazing how differently people can see the same thing,” he continued.
“Half of us saw a heartwarming story about immigrants who have dreams, who come to America, who work hard, get married, grow up, raise families, sing, dance, play backgammon.The other half? It was like the movie 28 Days Later.”The Turning Point USA “All-American Halftime Show” put on as an exclusionary alternative might as well have been called “the Kristi Noem Shoots Her Puppy Bowl”, joked Kimmel, “because this was not a good program”, beset by technical glitches and Kid Rock egregiously missing his lip sync cues.“This is it in a nutshell,” said Kimmel.“This what they do: they complain about how bad everything is, and then they do it worse.
And not only do they do it worse, they do it in jorts.“It’s all so performative,” he added.“Number one, if Bad Bunny had stopped by the White House to make nice with Trump like Nicki Minaj did, or Kanye West or the Village People, Maga would have no problem with Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl.They’d pretend to love him too.But since Bad Bunny isn’t a fan of Trump, since they knew that at half-time there would be a bunch of confused white people sitting on their couches being like ‘what the hell is this,’ they decided to make it a thing.
You know the things they always make to try to get us to forget about all the redacted names in the Epstein files? Like trans Budweiser and gay M&Ms? They made it one of those,“All the snowflakes are so upset they have to listen to Spanish for eight minutes, they decided to make their own half-time show,” he concluded,“And of course, like everything they do, it was a disaster,”
Prediction market Kalshi reached $1bn in trading volume during Super Bowl
Online prediction market Kalshi hit a daily record on Super Bowl Sunday, surpassing $1bn in trading volume, the company announced on Tuesday.Kalshi’s CEO, Tarek Mansour, called it an “incredible weekend”, telling CNBC that “Kalshi was the biggest brand of the Super Bowl this year, without running a Super Bowl ad”.Kalshi trading volume during the game was up 2,700% year over year. More than $100m were bets on Bad Bunny’s opening song and $45m on which artists would perform with him on stage. In comparison, the platform saw $27m in total trading volume at last year’s Super Bowl
Honeymoon period for new BP boss won’t last long
The clearing of the decks continues apace at BP. The last chief executive, Murray Auchincloss, got the heave-ho in December. Last month brought news of hefty write-downs on the troublesome low-carbon energy assets in solar and biogas. Now comes an admission that the current debt-reduction measures aren’t enough to ease the strain on an over-extended balance sheet. Share buy-backs are being suspended
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Barclays boss ‘shocked’ by Epstein revelations; BP annual profits slump 16% – as it happened
The chief executive of Barclays has said he is “deeply dismayed and shocked” at the “depravity and the corruption” revealed in the Epstein files, as the bank deals with the fallout of its ex-boss Jes Staley’s ties to the convicted child sex offender.In his first public comments on the matter since the US Department of Justice began publishing documents related to Jeffrey Epstein in December, CS Venkatakrishnan said his thoughts went out to the victims of Epstein, who died in jail in 2019 while awaiting child sex trafficking charges. He said:I’m very, very deeply dismayed and shocked by the moral depravity and the corruption that you’re reading about in the latest set of instalments. You know, my heart really goes out to victims of this scandal and these crimes.However, the Barclays boss – speaking as the bank reported annual profits – stopped short of commenting directly on allegations against his predecessor, Staley
AstraZeneca CEO hails NHS drug price deal but keeps pause on £200m UK investment
The boss of Britain’s biggest pharmaceutical company has said the government’s recent drug pricing deal is a “very positive step” but is unlikely to unfreeze a paused £200m investment in Cambridge.AstraZeneca’s chief executive, Pascal Soriot, suggested that a UK-US deal on NHS pricing agreed in December would not be “sufficient” to restart the project to build a research site in the east of England, which was paused in September.Soriot, who has rebuilt the company’s drugs pipeline since 2012 and turned it into the UK’s most valuable listed business, also described the US as “the most attractive market in the world”.During Keir Starmer’s visit to Beijing two weeks ago, AstraZeneca announced $15bn (£11bn) of investments in China, its second-biggest market, and is also pouring $50bn into US factories and labs by 2030.The British drugmaker listed its shares in New York and they began trading on 2 February, but it kept its main stock listing in London
Barclays CEO ‘shocked’ by Epstein revelations as bank deals with Staley fallout
The chief executive of Barclays has said he is “deeply dismayed and shocked” at the “depravity and the corruption” revealed in the Epstein files, as the bank deals with the fallout of its ex-boss Jes Staley’s ties to the convicted child sex offender.In his first public comments on the matter since the US Department of Justice began publishing documents related to Jeffrey Epstein in December, CS Venkatakrishnan said his thoughts went out to the victims of Epstein, who died in jail in 2019 while awaiting child sex trafficking charges.“I’m very, very deeply dismayed and shocked by the moral depravity and the corruption that you’re reading about in the latest set of instalments. You know, my heart really goes out to victims of this scandal and these crimes,” he said.However, the Barclays boss – speaking as the bank reported annual profits – stopped short of commenting directly on allegations against his predecessor, Staley
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